The Design Of Preservice Primary Teacher Education Science Subjects: The Emergence Of An Interactive Educational Design Model

Abstract

Over the past 20 years there have been numerous calls in Australia and beyond for extensive educational reforms to preservice teacher education in the sciences. Recommendations for science teacher education programs to integrate curriculum, instruction and assessment are at the forefront of such reforms. In this paper, we describe our scholarly action–research approach to the teaching of science and science–method subjects to Australian preservice primary-school teachers in the state of New South Wales. We present an interactive educational design model founded on a solid theoretical literature base that incorporates Pedagogical Content Knowledge as an integrative mediating framework and which drives students’ interactions with the elements of the design model. The results from our mixed-methods study suggest that the approaches adopted through two extended vignettes show significant increases in preservice teachers’ competence and confidence. Together, the qualitative and extensive quantitative data suggest participants obtain a newly developed sense of enthusiasm for science and an understanding of the role that it can play in the primary- school curriculum. The data provide strong evidence that the approaches being called for in some of the earlier reforms and most recently by Bybee (2014) are effective

The Charles Sturt University Remote Telescope Project

“…The first subject was tightly focussed on astronomy using it as the domain in which to address the issues of elementary school teachers' science content knowledge, teaching efficacy, and investigatory pedagogical approaches. Figure 4 shows the modelling of the Earth-Moon system collected more data on the impact of the courses on students' self-efficacy, content knowledge, alternative scientific conceptions out of which emerged a model that can be applied to any elementary teacher education course involving science (McKinnon et al, 2017).…”

Some Philosophical musings on the RTSRE conference

“…Example I set my elementary teacher-education students a variety of investigations in a subject largely focused on Astronomy (McKinnon et al, 2017). By week four of the semester, the cooperative group (usually 4) assigns each member two projects about the Solar System to teach to the rest of them.…”